When I decided to make a Substack, I gave it the following statement of purpose: “Maybe I’ll share reviews on books. Maybe I’ll share life updates. Maybe I will share my philosophical musings and thoughts on life (and on what my multiverse selves are doing). Maybe, dare I say it, I will someday get bold enough to share some of the stories or poems I’ve written.” The most logical place to begin seems to be giving a life update, but oh boy . . . that is a can of worms if there ever was one. That said, if I am to start taking ownership over the things that have happened to me over the past several months, it makes sense to first get them out in writing. Also, I am tired of people asking me what is new in my life, and it would be ever so satisfying (if not extremely pretentious) to tell them to refer to my blog/newsletter. So here we go.
Explaining where I am now requires a little bit of back story, and the most intuitive place to begin is last May, when I graduated from WVU with my Master of Social Work. Why did I get a Master of Social Work? That is an excellent question. My undergraduate degrees are in Public Health and Spanish, neither of which lend directly to one career. My entire college experience was a series of pursuing a variety of interests that I thought could lead to a decent-paying and also fulfilling job, but I lacked a concrete sense of direction. I spent the summer between my Junior and Senior year as an AmeriCorps volunteer with Energy Express. Working for AmeriCorps was the closest I got to figuring out what I wanted to do with my life, but somehow AmeriCorps gets away with providing their volunteers with a “living stipend” that is below the poverty line. Pursuing a degree in social work seemed like the correct course of action to take to work in social services while also being able to support myself financially.
When I graduated from my master’s program, no surprise here, I still had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. At this point, my fiancé had moved to Wheeling, West Virginia, so I narrowed my job search to Wheeling and the surrounding areas (including Pittsburgh–we love Pittsburgh). This is how I ended up working for Crittenton Services as a mental health therapist at a residential facility for girls ages 12-21. All of my clients were wards of the state, and the program is special in that it is the only residential facility in the state capable of housing pregnant and parenting teens.
There are certain experiences that come out of working in residential that may be difficult to understand if you have not worked in a similar environment. I have one other friend from grad school who works in residential, and she has been able to understand my work anecdotes in a way that my friends who work in outpatient settings cannot. I was the girls’ therapist, but I was also the person who drove them to the hospital or took them out to eat on their birthdays. I worked 8-4 as a therapist, but I also wound up picking up weekend and midnight shifts as a direct care worker because that is what is expected of you when you work at an understaffed and underfunded nonprofit in an underserved community. Working in residential allows you to make a real difference in people’s lives–seeing clients learn to manage angry outbursts and trust again after severe trauma, get off drugs when they’ve been using since they were preteens, and break intergenerational cycles of abuse will never be something that I can forget or let go of–yet working in residential also creates blurred lines in terms of what your professional role is and, more often than not, leads to some form of vicarious trauma and burnout.
At the same time that I was adjusting to a taxing (but fulfilling!) new career, I had to get used to life in a new town where I had no family or friends aside from my fiancé and one friend from college who lived nearby. I was only an hour and a half from my family and an hour (or 45 minutes, depending on how fast you drive) from a few of my friends who settled in Pittsburgh, but all of the sudden I went from seeing my friends and family every day in grad school to communicating via FaceTime once a week at best. The apartment where Ian and I lived was also not the best. He had a lease that did not end until August 2022, so I moved into Ian’s apartment from May to August of that year, before we found a new place to move in together.
The apartment was in an old (100+-year-old probably) building downtown, whose character included windows that had to be covered with plastic wrap to keep the draft out and a spot where the wall crumbled in a little bit more every time it rained, which we affectionately dubbed “the hole.” We lived on the third floor. Our neighbor on the second floor listened to songs like “Total Eclipse of the Heart” at all hours of the day, and I frequently considered sliding a note under her door to see if she was okay. I once watched our neighbor on the first floor throw potatoes at the outside of the building for no apparent reason, and the potatoes were then left on the ground to rot clear up until Ian and I moved out of our apartment. I will include pictures of The Hole and The Potatoes further along for your viewing pleasure.
By August, Ian and I were able to move into the apartment where we live now, about which I have no complaints. Moving was a bit of a pain in the ass, especially because an unanticipated gap between leases led to us living at the Holiday Inn for a brief stint, but I was happy to get settled into our new place. By August, I had also made friends at work. Call it trauma bonding, but my friends at Crittenton were able to understand things that went down in the social service sphere that I legally could not discuss with anyone else, and they were also just downright decent human beings who made me feel supported and loved during a transitional time in my life. I don’t believe that everything happens for a reason, but I do appreciate deeply that all of my work friends crossed my path in life.
Things were not calm per se, but they were routine, and I developed some sense of contentment during the six months between August 2022 and February 2023. Early in 2023, however, shit hit the fan at work. I had “on-call weeks” every six weeks, and in one on-call week I put in 28 extra hours outside of my standard 8-4 hours. I also faced a particularly traumatic situation with a client–distinct among all of the regularly traumatic situations that occur while working in social services–and I had a hard time moving past it. I started crying more frequently, sleeping less frequently, and I regularly developed headaches and stomachaches when I went to work. It wasn’t easy to leave a job that made me feel so passionate, but at the same time I recognized that it was necessary. I was constantly telling my clients to put their health and wellbeing first before worrying about others. What kind of a message would it send if I did not do the same?
I thought that moving from a therapist position in residential to the organization’s outpatient office would benefit me, so I accepted another job as a mental health therapist at Crittenton’s Wheeling outpatient office. Ian and I had been planning a trip to Asheville for the spring, and we decided to push forward the dates of our trip so that it would fall during the two weeks I would have off between positions.
Our trip to Asheville was . . . magical. Cliché, I know, but Western North Carolina is beautiful, and a little rest and relaxation is what I needed most. We visited the Biltmore, which is the closest thing North America has to a castle, went on a 5-mile hike that took as past 5 waterfalls at DuPont State Forest, and perused innumerable coffee shops and book shops in downtown Asheville. Coming back from Asheville, however, was less than ideal.
I thought that getting out of town and taking some time off work before starting my new job would be to my benefit, but if anything, the time away only gave a stark contrast that allowed me to see just how much of a toll my former job had taken on my mental and physical health. I started training for my new job and, at the same time, started getting headaches that made looking at light hurt. My stomach was also constantly upset, which did not bode well for a building in which there was only one bathroom. After my second day of training, I went home and cried almost without stopping from 7pm to 12am. I felt broken and useless. People moved on from traumatic situations all the time–why couldn’t I? I had chosen this life for myself and all of the sudden felt that I was not strong enough to bear it.
I started the new job on a Monday, and by that Wednesday I found myself at an impasse. Dark thoughts had invaded my mind overnight. The thoughts were not new to me, nor do I think that they need to be described in any further depth here, but they were thoughts that I incorrectly assumed I had overcome when I made the decision to become a mental health provider myself. My fiancé had left for work already, and I found myself staring at the wood of our kitchen table before me and thinking about the only four options that my mind would consider.
Option 1: I act on my thoughts.
Option 2: I drive myself to the hospital, which is what I would instruct a client to do if they were having those thoughts.
Option 3: I quit the new job.
Option 4: I ignore the thoughts and go to work.
I stared at the table and contemplated and contemplated and contemplated for a long time that morning. Ultimately, I chose option number four and drove myself to work, but the therapist inside of me was screaming loudly that it was time to use a “safety plan,” so I also texted one of my old friends from residential to let her know how I was feeling.
This friend texted me back in the middle of the day and asked if she could take me to the hospital.
My response: “No, but you can take me out to dinner.”
Which is how I found myself seated in a booth at one of my favorite local restaurants at 5pm that day, once again crying my eyes out.
I mentioned before that it is hard for someone who has not worked in residential to understand what working in residential is like and also that my 10 months of employment at Crittenton gave me friends that I could see myself maintaining for life. Both of those points ring true here. This particular friend became my lifeline on that day (which is not to say that she was not already my lifeline–the number of hours I spent in her office debriefing, sipping coffee, and sitting with the computer on mute so that others in meetings could not hear our commentary up until she quit a few months before me will always remain in my memory). She held my hand at the table and walked me through the process of crafting a resignation letter for a job that I had only held for three days. She reminded me that it’s not normal to cry about going to work, it’s okay to develop a trauma response to traumatic situations, and there are other jobs out there for me.
All of this lands me where I am now.
I have not worked in four weeks. When people ask about my job, I tell them that I am “in between jobs,” but the truth is that I have no idea what I will do next. I sometimes feel that I poured my heart and soul into something that it turned out I wasn’t any good at, but the letters that fill my desk, letters from girls whose lives I have touched, tell me otherwise. I feel purposeless, like a ship without a sail, but at the same time I am challenging myself to lean into the discomfort and get used to the sensation of being adrift with no particular destination in mind.
About a week after I left my very short-lived position at the outpatient office, I went on a bachelorette trip to Las Vegas to celebrate the wedding of one of my good friends from grad school, the one who worked in residential in Pittsburgh. I almost dipped out of the trip at the last minute because of everything that was going on in my life at the time. If you had asked me, I would have said that it was because I “wasn’t feeling well,” which was certainly true, but the real reason that I thought I should not go on the trip was that I felt like I didn’t deserve to have a good time after “giving up” on what I thought was my “calling.”
I ended up going to Las Vegas just to be a good friend, and I had the best time. The first day we were there, we visited the Venetian, which has shops, restaurants, an indoor canal with a fake sky, and of course lots of opportunities for gambling, and then we went on a bar crawl that evening. The second day we went to a beach-themed day club, and I got more vitamin D than I had probably absorbed in the last 12 months combined. The third day we went to drag brunch (and, let me tell you, Las Vegas drag is an incredible spectacle), and then we stayed out hanging out with some members of a bachelor party until 5AM.
I try to keep my recent trips to Asheville and Las Vegas in mind when I start feeling glum again. Of course, it is not possible for me to always be traveling, but it is worth it to remind myself that there is always more of the world to be explored, always more of life to be experienced. I tend to get very caught up in searching for my “purpose” and tie much of my self-worth to how much labor I can do, and that is something I am trying to consciously unlearn. It is a long process, and I am just beginning, but I am striving to let myself find the peace to “just be.”
Here are five quotes that have spoken to me recently:
“We must let go of the life we have planned, so as to accept the one that is waiting for us.” - Joseph Campbell
“What I am is good enough if I would only be it openly.” - Carl Rogers
“And now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good.” - John Steinback
“Acceptance is the only way out of hell.” - Marsha Linehan
“You, yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection.” - Buddha
And here are the pictures that were promised, along with a few others:
The Hole
The Potatoes
The new apartment (much nicer)
Asheville
Las Vegas
Until Next Time,
Alexa
I love you. I am so proud of you ❤️
❤️❤️❤️❤️